How To Love Everyone – Even Complete Fucking Assholes

“Love everyone” sounds like bullshit. It sounds like one of those things people say. It sounds like the kind of thing an evangelist says in his mega church but then he also says God Hates Fags. It sounds like something Jesus said in his pussy mode, in the mode that got him crucified, meekly, like the kind of pussy who gets crucified. It sounds like the kind of thing the Buddha said when the Buddha…well, nothing like being crucified happened to the Buddha. He lived into his 80s and died from food poisoning. But, regardless, “Love everyone” sounds like one of those fucking things the Buddha said and you’re like “Yeah, right: that’s just one of those things. You don’t really mean it. How could anyone do that?”

But really, it’s the thing. It’s the main thing.

One obstacle is that some people are major assholes and you don’t want to be nice to them. Even more – some people are awful people, and you loathe and even fear them. And, you know, there’s always Hitler. Even Hitler? Because it’s all or nothing, am I right? I mean, it’s either “Love Everyone” or I get to pick and choose, and if I get to pick and choose then get off me, who are you to judge?

But it’s all or nothing. It really is. It’s all or nothing. And loving everyone will help you get by. It will help everything.

But yeah – what about assholes? And leave off Hitler for now. What about the meth head who stole my kid’s bike? How, and more importantly, why should I try to love that piece of shit?

Here’s why: It’s because you and the meth head are part of the same thing, you’re part of the same complex, and if you hate him, you hate yourself. Because you aren’t separate from the causes and conditions that resulted in his stealing your kid’s bike.

Um…what?

It’s because you and the meth head are part of the same thing, you’re part of the same complex, and if you hate him, you hate yourself. Because you aren’t separate from the causes and conditions that resulted in his stealing your kid’s bike.

Saying it twice doesn’t necessarily help!

No, but it might. So read it again!

It doesn’t.

No good? All right – let’s dig in.

We humans are naturally prone to a fundamental delusion, viz. that we are separate individual entities existing independently from the rest of the universe. This is because what most of us think of as ourselves is actually a small part of our mind-body complex, specifically, a cluster of feelings and memories thrown into consciousness in order to make sense of the fundamentally senseless avalanche of data gathered by our…shit…I can’t think of another word…gathered by our senses. But “senses” in the different sense of…shit. There it is again…

Well, tough shit – figure it out! “What most of us think of as Ourselves is a cluster of mental events arising in consciousness in order to make sense of the fundamentally senseless avalanche of data gathered by our Six Senses.” (Buddhism holds that there a six senses, not five. The Sixth Sense is Thinking, its object the Mind.)

So, basically, you think you’re separate from everything only because by an accident of evolution you possess self-consciousness. And while the consciousness is indisputable, the self is much more amorphous and hard to pin down. And in fact, while you most certainly do exist, you possess no lasting self, no self at all.

At what point in this arrangement are you a separate, independently existing entity?

There are innumerable other examples, of course: food, water. Love. Human beings are ill-suited to live in outer space, at the bottom of the ocean, or at the poles. We are massively dependent on our environment in order to survive. And again, it’s not just that we live in it, like we live in a house. We are part of it. We consume it and create it. Our breath leaves our body as carbon dioxide, which is used by plants to create the oxygen we breathe. After we die our bodies will become soil or, more likely nowadays, smoke and ash. Nothing is wasted or destroyed. It’s a closed system.

But that’s not why we feel separate. We feel separate because of self-consciousness, which is demonstrably part of that system, and because of our sense of free will, which is illusory.

What?!

I’m sorry, it is. It just is. You don’t have free will the way you think you do. At best you have the kind of free will Daniel Dennett thinks you do, which is a poor compromise. You want to think you initiate your own actions and could have done otherwise, given precisely the same conditions, but it’s simply untrue. Well, at any rate, it appears to be very unlikely. Just don’t bother with it. You aren’t “free” that way.

So if you’re part of this system, if there’s no separate self, if your choices are determined, and we’re all in that boat, in this sense realm, if we’re tossed on this ocean of being…then who is there to hate?

Who do you hate?

You can disagree, certainly. I disagree with almost everyone, myself most of all! But what sense is there in hating? And you needn’t approve, you needn’t endorse. The meth head should not have stolen your daughter’s bike. Stealing is wrong, and it hurt your daughter’s feelings. He should give the bike back. If you can take it from him, take it from him. But you can love him while you do it. Because he was born into this place just like you, and no one asked him. And one day he’ll leave it. And if everything that happened to him happened to you – everything, not just that you’re you addicted to meth, but that you were born to his mother and lived his life up to now – everything – then sure as shit you’d be riding down the sidewalk on a hot pink Huffy with tassels on the handlebars right now.

And Hitler? Fucking Hitler?

Well, it’s silly to bring up Hitler all the time, to reduce everything. It’s a childish argument! And if we all loved each other more there’d be no traction for Hitlers. Hitler didn’t do it all on his own. But he was bad, to be sure, a nightmare, the Devil. So what do you do? If you’re given the chance to go back in time, to 1932? What do you do, knowing the future?

Feel compassion for the twisted soul, the nightmare. Love the boy, the innocent boy. Love the little boy who once was, and put a bullet in his head, with compassion, with Love.

Comments

I like your energy and use of colloquial language to explain one of the Buddha’s key teachings on loving-kindness or metta. One of my favorite Buddhist teachers is Joseph Goldstein. He has a very good talk on loving kindness here: http://tinyurl.com/qeej388

I think people sometimes confuse loving with liking. You don’t have to like the depraved in this world but you can love them. Love in the spiritual sense is a wish that no sentient being suffer. Clearly murderers suffer otherwise they wouldn’t do what they do.

I’m also reminded of what Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Hate is too big of burden to bear. I have decided to love.”

I agree with you: the distinction between “liking” and “loving” is a big hurdle for many people. In the end (like everything?) I think it comes down to craving and aversion. We crave the pleasant feelings of liking someone…and perhaps we crave the certainty of hatred.

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